Empire's Twin: U.S. Anti-imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism

EMPIRE’S TWIN

U.S. Anti-imperialism from

the Founding Era to the Age

of Terrorism

Edited by Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

CONQUEST AND ANTICOLONIALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1. Imperialism and Nationalism in the Early American Republic

2. Native Americans against Empire and Colonial Rule

3. The Imperialism of the Declaration of Independence in the Civil War Era

PART II

ANTI-IMPERIALISM AND THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE

4. Anti-imperialism in the U.S. Territories after 1898

5. U.S. Anti-imperialism and the Mexican Revolution

6. Anti-imperialism, Missionary Work, and the King-Crane Commission

PART III

THE EXTENT AND LIMITS OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

7. Global Anti-imperialism in the Age of Wilson

8. Feminist Historiography, Anti-imperialism, and the Decolonial

9. Resource Use, Conservation, and the Environmental Limits of Anti-imperialism, c. 1890–1930

PART IV

ANTI-IMPERIALISM IN THE AGE OF AMERICAN POWER

10. Promoting American Anti-imperialism in the Early Cold War

11. Ruling-Class Anti-imperialism in the Era of the Vietnam War

12. Whither American Anti-imperialism in a Postcolonial World?

Notes

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

In the course of editing this book, we have incurred the usual debts and then some. We would first like to thank the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, which hosted the 2011 conference that launched this project. Without the support of Nigel Bowles, Jane Rawson, and Laura Harvey, the conference, and hence this book, would not have been possible. Further thanks are due to the Oxford Fell Fund and the Oxford History Faculty, both of which generously provided funding. Logistical support came from Queens College and Corpus Christi College. Thanks must also go to the benefactors of the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Chair in American History at Oxford, a position that Ian Tyrrell occupied for the academic year 2010–11.

This book is much more than a revised set of conference papers. Several individuals were unable for a variety of reasons to proceed to the final volume; and we have included chapters by new contributors Jeffrey Ostler and Laura Belmonte, both of whom have been outstanding in their timely collaboration with us. We have, ourselves, also written a final chapter dealing synoptically with post-1945 American anti-imperialism. All the contributors to this volume have been tireless in their efforts to improve the final product and in the collective endeavor to rewrite and extend the original papers. We also extend our thanks to Elizabeth Borgwardt, Amy Kaplan, Francis Shor, and Frank Ninkovich, all of whom made important contributions to this project. The project was enriched by the comments of Gareth Davies, John Thompson, Nicholas Guyatt, and Dan Scroop. Steve Tuffnell provided tireless assistance for the conference and book, for which we are grateful. Thanks also goes to Skye Montgomery for producing the index. The editors of the series The United States in the World and the anonymous readers for Cornell University Press have made this volume possible with their insightful critiques and encouragement, as has Cornell University Press’s Michael McGandy.

Our partners Diane Collins and Julie Wood played personal roles without which any of our work would be impossible or unthinkable.

Introduction

IAN TYRRELL AND JAY SEXTON

The year was 1900, and the American acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Samoa was less than two years old. A bloody war of resistance against U.S. rule was already under way in the Philippines, and at home a presidential election loomed. The Great Commoner William Jennings Bryan ran as the Democratic Party candidate for president. At the brand-spanking-new Convention Hall of Kansas City, the silver-tongued orator spoke in stirring tones at the party’s national convention, drawing on a historical tradition of anti-imperialism that still has resonance.

If the Republicans are prepared to censure all who have used language calculated to make the Filipinos hate foreign domination, let them condemn the speech of Patrick Henry. When he uttered that passionate appeal, Give me liberty or give me death, he expressed a sentiment which still echoes in the hearts of men. Let them censure Jefferson; of all the statesmen of history none have used words so offensive to those who would hold their fellows in political bondage. Let them censure Washington, who declared that the colonists must choose between liberty and slavery. Or, if the statute of limitations has run against the sins of Henry and Jefferson and Washington, let them censure Lincoln, whose Gettysburg speech will be quoted in defense of popular government when the present advocates of force and conquest are forgotten.¹

Bryan’s speech was as much a history lesson as a political ploy. It evoked a long tradition, one that told of the nation’s anti-imperial roots in the faith of the founding fathers, roots that Bryan believed were continually reaffirmed in the course of the Republic’s first century. In his view, these principles were in dire danger.

Bryan’s position was replete with the complexities and contradictions of American anti-imperialism. He had not opposed the Spanish-American War to free Cuba, and the platform of the Democratic Party did not oppose expansion—a euphemism also used by Republicans—but only overseas island possessions taken against the will of the inhabitants. Not a word did the platform mention about the questionable annexation of Hawaii, and Democrats announced: We are not opposed to territorial expansion when it takes in desirable territory which can be erected into States in the Union, and whose people are willing and fit to become American citizens. The party also favored trade expansion by every peaceful and legitimate means. Democrats opposed only seizing or purchasing distant islands to be governed outside the Constitution, and whose people can never become citizens.² Anti-imperialism was clearly selective, geographically, racially, and constitutionally. Bryan was against formal empire, and against grabbing lands where nonwhite people remained in a majority, but he was implicitly willing to accept the vast nineteenth-century annexation of land from Indians and Mexicans as perfectly legitimate.

Another tension stemmed from the statement in the Democratic platform on the universality of anti-imperialism. This was not just an American tradition. If it were possible to obliterate every word written or spoken in defense of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, a war of conquest would still leave its legacy of perpetual hatred, for it was God Himself who placed in every human heart the love of liberty. He never made a race of people so low in the scale of civilization or intelligence that it would welcome a foreign master.³ Self-government was a matter of human rights, not just American rights. These human rights could be a reason for nonintervention in the affairs of others, including nonwhites, but they could also be construed by imperialists to require U.S. intrusion to help along the processes of universal freedom. That, ironically, could lead to an imperialist form of anti-imperialism.

Bryan lost the election, and his anti-imperialism is remembered as the statement of a defeated minority of Americans. Yet, paradoxically, his policies soon prevailed in public sentiment and even in government action, in the sense—and to the degree—that Americans and their governments quickly became uncomfortable with formal colonies. The anti-imperialist forces had wrought their political and cultural effects. Scholars would come to call the acquisition of the island empire a great aberration in U.S. diplomatic history.⁴ Generations of schoolchildren would grow up being taught that the United States was fundamentally an anti-imperialist nation. By the mid-twentieth century, anti-imperialism had become a functional and foundational part of American exceptionalism. The conditions had been created to allow Donald Rumsfeld, the irascible secretary of defense during another imperial adventure a century after the Philippines war, to blithely state: We don’t seek empires. We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.⁵

In historiography, however, the tide had already turned, in part because of the very actions that Rumsfeld sought to justify. Gone was the dominance of the great aberration thesis. In its place came an avalanche of scholarship that made clear the centrality of imperialism in American history.⁶ Some conservatives such as Niall Ferguson and Max Boot urged Americans to accept the implications of their actions and their preponderant power and use the term empire unabashedly.⁷ From the Left, too, the empire word is now so regularly applied that the epithet is no longer shocking or even very controversial.

As the historiographical stocks of empire have risen, those of anti-imperialism have fallen. Whereas over the course of American history until the 1990s it was empire that was so often erased from memory, now it is the tradition of anti-imperialism that scholars are more likely to overlook. This is not to say that there are no studies of American anti-imperialism. It is not surprising that scholarly interest in the topic has tended to coincide with periods of dissent over foreign policy. The 1920s and ’30s witnessed the first modern wave of anti-imperial scholarship, which included works ranging from the political history of Fred Harvey Harrington to the radical critiques of American empire in a series published by Vanguard Press.⁸ Another flourish of works appeared in the wake of the Vietnam War, examining mostly political anti-imperialism and focusing on the period 1898–1920.⁹

In more recent times, most scholars interested in anti-imperialism have approached it from the perspective of those outside the American Anti-Imperialist League or the political establishment more generally.¹⁰ Important work has been produced on anti-imperialism in relation to feminism and suffrage.¹¹ Historians such as Judith Stein and Gerald Horne have explored African American anti-imperialism in work covering W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africanism. African Americans have been among the vanguard of American anti-imperialism, Gerald Horne writes, though some historians have scandalously neglected them. For the mid-twentieth century, Penny Von Eschen has explored how African American activists linked the struggle for civil rights at home to the breakdown of the old colonial order in Africa and Asia.¹² Richard Seymour has brought these themes together in a synthetic history of American anti-imperialism that ties its development to the political Left.¹³

These works focus on social protest movements or individuals, and they concern relatively marginalized groups and their allies fighting against discrimination at home while opposing imperialism abroad. They are in line with what might be called an anti-imperial tradition of minority protest against the mainstream of power politics and institutions. This work has had an important political purpose—indeed, the scholarship itself reflects Bryan’s approach of mobilizing a line of opinion in support of contemporary political debates. Readers on anti-imperialism, for example, give students access to the classic texts and ideas of the anti-imperialists, exposing them to the rich vein of foreign-policy dissent in American history.¹⁴ Recent scholarship also has had a crucial historiographical function: by examining the views of those outside the political establishment, it has brought to light the central role in anti-imperial thought played by dissenting minorities.

There is a need to build upon this work, particularly by expanding its parameters to include anti-imperial dissenters in U.S. colonial possessions. Equally, however, there is a need to step back and assess just how widespread and deeply woven into American culture anti-imperialism has been. A striking and paradoxical feature of the American critique of empire is that it has emerged not just from the oppressed, but also from within the corridors of power.¹⁵ Whereas few American statesmen would have labeled themselves imperialists, almost all would proclaim themselves to be anti-imperialists. The critique of empire produced by elite political actors certainly differed from that of dissenters and activists, but it was nonetheless a form of anti-imperialism. This is not to suggest that the United States has been a consistent anti-imperial power, but rather to raise the question of how and why anti-imperialism became something of a shared lens through which a wide spectrum of Americans—including those who were the architects of American empire—viewed the world around them.¹⁶ Recent scholarship on the British Empire has wrestled with similar issues and attempted to bring the fields of anti-imperialism and imperialism together in fruitful analytical relationships.¹⁷ What has become apparent in the British case might hold even truer in that of the United States: anti-imperialism and empire cannot be easily separated, and their fortunes have been symbiotic, waxing and waning in a myriad of ways. It is time to reconsider that anti-imperialist tradition in all its permutations, not least because anti-imperialism has deeply affected the kind of empire the United States has been. Anti-imperialism was, in short, empire’s twin.

This volume is premised on a catholic definition of anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism has been both a strand of political thought and a form of social and political action. It has been a foreign policy, a versatile language, and a political cause that animates groups such as the Anti-Imperialist League. It also has been a cultural formation, a form of subaltern resistance, and a type of historiography. The meaning of anti-imperialism is contingent upon historical context. For much of the nineteenth century, for example, there was no such thing as anti-imperialism in the sense that this term did not exist. Yet there was anti-imperialism in the broader sense that the projection of power of one nation or people over another was contested and resisted. The language and symbolism of anti-imperialism have varied across time and space: anti-monarchism, Anglophobia, religious revivalism, self-determination, and anti-Americanism, to name a few, have been forms of anti-imperialism. These various vocabularies and formations have been both historically contingent and diachronically connected. The challenge confronting the historian of anti-imperialism—and the aim of this volume—is to keep in view the particularism of specific anti-imperialisms, while also tracking the evolutionary and interconnected story of the longue durée.

Taken as a whole, the following chapters make clear the significance of anti-imperialism in American history and the engagement of the United States with the wider world. Rather than attempt to provide a comprehensive or linear history of American anti-imperialism, the purpose of this volume is to highlight its diverse manifestations, as well as to showcase the different ways that historians can approach it. The agenda is threefold: first, to broaden our conception of anti-imperialist actors, ideas, and actions; second, to chart this story across the range of American history, from the Revolution to our own era; and third, to open up transnational and global dimensions of American anti-imperialism.

Varieties of Anti-imperialism

We take as our starting point the diversity of historians’ conception of empire. Empire is not a single thing but a complex and ever-changing set of unequal relationships. There are different manifestations of empire, though one should not draw too sharp a distinction between formal and informal imperialism, given that they share traits and often serve similar functions. Furthermore, formal and informal are themselves not discrete categories, since U.S. power has been exerted to different degrees in different areas of informal control, and at different times. If historians have at times overstated the significance of the formal/informal divide, they have been correct to emphasize the various forms empire has taken in American history: white settlement of continental North America, wars of conquest against Native Americans and Mexico, the forcible annexation of foreign lands such as the Philippines, the establishment of unequal economic relationships and regimes, the use of political and economic institutions to compel weaker states and peoples to comport with U.S. demands—all of these and more can be seen as imperialist, even though they differ from one another in many ways.

The very range of imperialism, in short, ensures that its mirror image of anti-imperialism is similarly diverse. Its versatility and evolution present a challenge to historians, not least because many of its proponents did not find it necessary to come up with a strict definition of what they took anti-imperialism to mean. In some cases, it might best be labeled anticolonialism, on the grounds that what was being opposed was formal colonialism, not the more general projection of imperial power. To further complicate matters, when critiquing other empires (the British in the nineteenth century or the evil empire of the Soviets in more recent times) Americans have tended to apply standards different from those they have applied to their own empire. As many of the essays in this volume make clear, there has been no small amount of hypocrisy in Americans’ do as I say, not as I do denunciations of foreign empires. The task of telling the story of anti-imperialism is made even more difficult by historical actors, like Rumsfeld himself, who have seized upon the language of anti-imperialism as part of a pitch for covertly imperialist policies of foreign intervention, or perhaps even out of the belief that their actions were aligned with anti-imperial traditions.

Rather than focusing on sterile definitional history, a debate that is ultimately not resolvable, this volume’s emphasis is on the historical actors that generated anti-imperial critiques. This volume does not impose a fixed definition on them but instead seeks to follow their own attempts to wrestle with what constitutes imperialism, why they thought it wrong, and what actions those beliefs led them to take. This approach expands the cast of characters and ideas that merit consideration as anti-imperial. Chapters in this volume reexamine those who traditionally have been labeled anti-imperialist (the revolutionaries of 1776, Woodrow Wilson), as well as those who have not often been considered as such by historians, though imagined themselves as part of an anti-imperial lineage (Southern secessionists, Cold War propagandists). The objective of this volume is not to determine which groups were the most authentic carriers of an imagined anti-imperial tradition, but rather to examine how, why, and to what effect such a range of historical actors developed and articulated critiques of empire.

In seeking to capture the range and variations of anti-imperialism it may be useful to note how historians have treated other anti movements or intellectual currents. Antislavery is a similar phenomenon in that it is negatively framed, yet elastic and contingent in historiographical treatment. No one now writes of antislavery as if it were a single and consistent thing. Rather, historians have written much on its genesis and evolution over time, as well as the various (and at times contradictory) policies that it became identified with—colonization and deportation, free-soil, gradual and compensated emancipation, immediatism and racial equality. Antislavery thought also must be viewed in relation to the evolution of its alter ego, pro-slavery thought. Finally, antislavery ideas took on different forms—political, cultural, literary, and moral, to name the most obvious. This volume seeks to explore anti-imperialism in a similar way. Investigation of the topic should not be limited to historical actors who were card-carrying members of the Anti-Imperialist League, any more than the study of antislavery should be limited to those belonging to abolitionist societies.

Instead of merely a road not taken or a social/political group that lost battles to determine policy, U.S. anti-imperialism, this volume contends, was an important shaper of American empire. The essays here build upon the insight of the New Left that anti-imperialists, far from opposing all forms of empire, were inextricably bound up in imperialist processes and structures.¹⁸ This theme plays out in many different ways in the chapters that follow. First, some actors were anti-imperialist on some issues, while imperialist on others. There is no better example here than the founding fathers themselves, who broke the imperial bond with Britain in part to advance their aim of westward colonization. Second, and related, many Americans were anti-imperial when it came to opposing illiberal Old World empires while imperialist when it came to advocating what they viewed as their new, more moral, empire of liberty. This attitude can be found across U.S. history, from the promoters of westward expansion in the nineteenth century to those that trumpeted the forcible promotion of democracy abroad in more recent times. Third, many of the critics of imperialism within the U.S. empire called for its reform rather than its demolition. This was the case with a range of actors, including missionaries, dissenters within the post-1898 possessions, and even U.S. grand strategists whose realpolitik led them to repudiate costly and counterproductive imperialist policies.

Anti-imperialism traditionally has been seen as mirroring external empire, but its domestic or internal applications, particularly in the nineteenth century, should not be neglected. Many of the most powerful anti-imperial critiques in American history have focused on the danger of imperialism within the United States, normally in the form of an aggressive central government trampling upon the rights of individuals, states, or social groups. A variation of this theme can also be seen in the anti-imperialism of Native Americans who resisted the dispossession of their lands by white colonizers supported by federal power. Revealingly, the word imperialism itself appears initially to have been used in the United States in relation to domestic matters, not foreign ones. Historians long have credited Victorian critics of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s embrace of foreign adventurism for coining the word in the 1870s.¹⁹ Yet Charles Sumner used imperialism as a description for Radical Reconstruction at home in 1867 (in this case, as a positive description: Call it imperialism, if you please; it is simply the imperialism of the Declaration of Independence, with all its promises fulfilled.²⁰) The first usage of imperialism in the United States pertained to internal politics and the power of the federal government, not overseas expansion.

White Southerners squirmed at this Yankee imperialism, calling instead for the restoration of internal anti-imperialism in the form of home rule and states’ rights. Even in the early twenty-first century, this brand of internal anti-imperialism could still be detected. The Tea Party identification of federal power as a threat to individual and state liberty is but a modern reincarnation of this old anti-imperial critique. Some conservatives and libertarians expanded this critique of federal power in the domestic realm into a broader anti-imperial vision of U.S. foreign policy. Just as contemporary leftists claim the mantle of anti-imperialism, so too have some on the political Right who see the policies of an interventionist president like George W. Bush as a betrayal of middle-American anti-imperialism, as a conservative commentator has recently put it.²¹

Though in many cases anti-imperialism has been a reactionary impulse, this need not mean that American anti-imperialists were consistently negative, narrow, or bigoted in their outlook. Though, by its very nature, anti-imperialism is negatively framed, its proponents invariably face the question of what should replace the imperialism that they denounce. Just as recent work has made the case for a positive agenda among isolationists,²² the essays here argue that anti-imperialism was more than just a negative and reactionary movement. For colonial peoples, this agenda obviously began with the notions of self-determination and nation building. For Americans, social reform, peace agitation, civil liberties, and equality for women were often linked with anti-imperialism and isolationism in the decades from the 1890s to the 1920s, and associated with names such as Jane Addams.²³ Among the policy-making elite, anti-imperialism can be seen to have shaped their worldview and diplomatic agenda, at times mitigating interventionist impulses or leading statesmen to consider the costs of expansionist policies.

Anti-imperialism across Time

Our most important intervention is to chart anti-imperialism across time and space. In part, this is a story of continuity, of the development of an anti-imperial tradition. There are recurring symbols, texts, and ideas from 1776 to the present. One of the most important is the memory of 1776 itself that Bryan invoked. Subsequent generations of Americans came to see the Revolution as the genesis of anti-imperialism, the beginning of a new and enlightened world order. The Revolution’s utility lay in its extraordinary versatility: nearly all major anti-imperial groups and movements have imagined themselves as carriers of the tradition of 1776. The memory of the American Revolution also has had purchase outside the United States among anticolonial nationalists both within and without the American empire. The Declaration of Independence, David Armitage has made clear, circulated around the globe, serving as a malleable template through which peoples could make their case for self-determination.²⁴

Though the anti-imperial critique shows much continuity across time, countless differences and points of contestation are also manifest, not least because imperialism itself is a moving target. The very ubiquity of the American Revolution in anti-imperial thought ensured that its meaning and legacy were contested. Rather than attempt to construct a linear history of American anti-imperialism, the chapters that follow uncover what it has meant in different historical contexts. The vocabulary, meaning, and action of anti-imperialism have varied greatly. Anachronism is the great danger in a study of this nature: it is all too easy to project back in time modern forms and ideas of anti-imperialism, not least because anti-imperial movements have constructed linear and ahistorical narratives to legitimate their contemporary positions. A related danger concerns that of romantic nostalgia, or the tendency to see anti-imperialists as being on the right side of important questions. No doubt many anti-imperial positions in American history harmonize with the values of contemporary historians. But reducing anti-imperialism to those historical actors that anticipated today’s norms flattens its diverse forms that this volume seeks to uncover.

Part one of this volume, Conquest and Anticolonialism in the Nineteenth Century, explores the symbiotic, if paradoxical, relationship between the conquest of the North American continent and the development of a powerful tradition of American anti-imperialism. We begin with Peter Onuf’s examination of how the roots of American anti-imperialism lay in a particular critique of the British Empire. From the beginning, the denunciation of the British Empire was fused with the imperialist project of settler expansion on the North American continent. As the nineteenth century progressed, Americans constructed an imagined memory of their Revolution as a highly principled and singular anticolonial revolt against an interfering and distant empire. The language of anti-imperialism for much of this period was that of Anglophobia and anti-monarchism, and its political applications were as often internal (against domestic political opponents) as external. Anti-imperialism was further fueled by the growing Irish-Catholic immigration to the United States whose memories of English landlords and the Great Famine of 1845–48 stoked anti-imperialist indignation. This proto-anti-imperial critique proved to be versatile and malleable, even being deployed as justification for U.S. territorial expansion on the grounds that it weakened the position of Old World empires in North America. It was appropriated and reconfigured by a variety of actors, including Native Americans. In an essay that spans the nineteenth century, Jeffrey Ostler examines the diverse forms of Native American anti-imperialism, giving particular emphasis to religious revivalism. Some white Americans struggled to square their imagined anti-imperial tradition with the policies and processes of their era, not least their dispossession of Indian lands and the war of conquest against Mexico. No issue attracted more political debate on the meaning of the American Revolution, however, than did the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of the Union and the Civil War. Jay Sexton’s essay explores the ways in which Southerners and Northerners alike understood their respective causes in relation to the imagined tradition of anti-imperialism.

Part two, Anti-imperialism and the New American Empire, explores the evolution, expansion, and foreign appropriation of anti-imperialism in the new context of American colonial and global power at the turn of the century. By 1900, the period of high European colonialism in which Bryan operated saw imperialists come out to repudiate anti-imperialism and proclaim the long-standing nature of American empire, as Senator Albert Beveridge did in his speeches on the annexation of the Philippines. Many Americans waxed lyrical on the rise of a Greater America that encompassed the island territories, and scoffed at anti-imperialists, while others sought to adapt an imagined national tradition of anti-imperialism to the new political context. But, as Julian Go’s essay makes clear, the conversation on American empire was never a purely internal one, and as the American use of force outside the continental United States increased in the years 1898–1934, anti-imperialists throughout the new American empire and beyond themselves reworked and adapted to their own purposes the nineteenth-century American traditions of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Early twentieth-century anti-imperialism was a diverse and contested phenomenon. Alan Knight’s essay on the U.S. response to the Mexican Revolution shows the wide range of policies and interest groups that sought to advance some form of anti-imperialism. His survey of U.S. policy finds that what might be considered anti-imperial—the eventual rejection of coercive and annexationist policies in favor of a policy of engagement and collaboration—nonetheless sought the imperialist objectives of the advancement of U.S. economic, political, and strategic interests. U.S. policy toward Mexico in this period thus portended the informal imperialism characteristic of the later post-1945 American empire. Ussama Makdisi engages with similar themes in his essay on the American presence in the Middle East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The hostility of American missionaries to the European and Ottoman empires found political expression in the King-Crane commission of 1919. Yet, as in Mexico, Americans’ aversion to formal empire in the Middle East was wedded to paternalistic assumptions that many Arabs were unprepared for self-government and required the tutelage of the United States. Ironically, the legacy of American anti-imperialism in the Middle East was that the liberal ideas propagated by missionaries in time became the basis for the anti-American critiques of the post-1945 era.

Part three, The Extent and Limits of Anti-imperialism, begins with Erez Manela’s essay examining how World War I gave new prominence to anti-imperialism at home and abroad. The rise of Bolshevism and the Wilsonian alternative of the Fourteen Points strengthened the position of anti-imperialism internationally—indeed, Manela contends that this period witnessed the birth of anti-imperialism as a principle for the restructuring of global order. The sheer carnage of World War I, a war widely thought to be the result of imperialist intrigues, and the disillusionment over the failure of the Versailles Treaty to supply a viable long-term settlement, meant that anti-imperialism in the United States now became aligned with opposition to American involvement in foreign wars. The spread of Communist internationalism, too, had its effects on American anti-imperialism, as formerly Progressive reform anti-imperialists were radicalized into opponents of financial imperialism, particularly as it came to be practiced in the name of dollar diplomacy in the Caribbean basin.²⁵ The Communist International organized the All-American Anti-Imperialist League, which operated across Latin America as well as in the United States. As Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union noted, the U.S. affiliate was inspired by our Communist friends but had both a membership and an appeal outside the Communist movement.²⁶

Spurred by the forces of nationalism and international socialism, anti-imperialism became by the mid-twentieth century a global political force and predominant culture extending far beyond the United States and its areas of influence. The ascendancy of anti-imperialism by that time did not rule out the pursuit of American empire, particularly when advanced informally. Indeed, decolonization was, the New Left argued long ago, a way of prying open the protected colonial markets of the former European empires. Thus Franklin D. Roosevelt and others who spoke against European empires in World War II framed their approach as anticolonial rather than in the broader language of anti-imperialism.²⁷

If anti-imperialism picked up steam globally in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not without its limits, particularly in the United States. In a conceptual essay, Patricia Schechter examines the limits of anti-imperialism in the history and historiography of turn-of-the-century feminism. She suggests that the concept of the decolonial has greater explanatory potential for understanding feminist encounters with empire than does anti-imperialism. Ian Tyrrell’s essay approaches the limits of American anti-imperialism by looking at recent international critiques of globalization from an environmental point of view, and through critical environmental histories that find anti-imperialism and conservation connected. He asks why the connection between anti-imperialism and environmental concerns is relatively underdeveloped in the American context.

The final section, Anti-imperialism in the Age of American Power, considers the nature of anti-imperialism in an era of U.S. ascendancy. American anti-imperialism in the years since World War II became complicated by how the decolonization of European empires related to the struggle against communism and the division of the world into free and enslaved, a point explored in Laura Belmonte’s essay on U.S. and Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. From the American point of view, this anticommunist crusade aimed to liberate the world from the oppression of the Soviet Union’s evil empire, or at least to hold the line against it, thus legitimating assertive and interventionist policies in the Third World. That Western European countries to varying degrees invited U.S. participation in their struggle to survive—that the American empire was an empire by invitation²⁸—gave further weight to the conception of U.S. Cold War policy as an outgrowth of anti-imperial traditions.

But as Soviet propagandists stated, interventionist U.S. policies sat uneasily beside American professions of anti-imperialism. Furthermore, domestic objections to U.S. imperialism abroad reappeared with great force again in the 1960s. An early example can be seen in the opposition to U.S. interference in Cuba, as in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that became infamous through its association with Lee Harvey Oswald. More than Cuba, anti–Vietnam War protests spurred the resurgence in the idea of the American empire among what became known as the New Left, and certain radical antiwar groups defined their agitation as anti-imperialist.²⁹ A rich historiography illuminates the extent of the opposition to the war and that opposition’s anti-imperialist connections. But some of these connections were prominent within the American political system as representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties.³⁰ Robert Buzzanco’s essay adds to this picture, showing that in the case of dissent at home during the Vietnam War era, some of the most powerful calls to draw back from imperial entanglements in the post–World War II period originated from within the military-industrial complex.

An important subtheme running through the essays concerns how anti-imperialism grew as an ideal in the twentieth century within the American imagination, and within global society. This is not to suggest that the United States was the only source of global anti-imperialism, nor that foreigners who took up American anti-imperialist symbols did so uncritically. In fact, foreigners repeatedly adapted these symbols to their own purposes. In this volume, the American-centered part of this global story is developed empirically by following certain symbols and texts as they took root among ever larger groups of peoples: especially the Declaration of Independence or the anticolonial appropriation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The global development of ideas of anti-imperialism can also be linked in part to the rise of the United States as a global force (which indirectly made American symbols of anti-imperialism of greater political importance nationally and internationally as U.S. power increased). The revulsion against World War I along with the rise, after World War II, of antiracism, antifascism, and human rights agitation that propelled opposition to colonialism in Africa and Asia helps to explain the shift. The final chapter, coauthored by Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, tracks anti-imperialism in this decolonizing and postcolonial era, when imperialism took new and often less visible forms.

Transnational Connections

Though anti-imperialism clearly crossed national boundaries, historiographical debates within the United States have only begun to consider such contexts. A complete survey of such matters is beyond the scope of this book and requires a host of local studies tracing national anti-imperial reactions to U.S. global and regional power. Our focus here has been principally on anti-imperialism within the United States but also extends to representative places that had intimate and long relationships with American power: Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Middle East. In these cases, the direction of anti-imperial traffic moved both ways. First, the United States projected anti-imperialism outward, as we have seen. Symbols such as the Declaration